Manage detailed monitoring for your EC2 instances
Amazon CloudWatch provides two categories of monitoring: basic monitoring and detailed monitoring. By default, your instance is configured for basic monitoring. You can optionally enable detailed monitoring to help you more quickly identify and act on operational issues. You can enable or turn off detailed monitoring at launch or when the instance is running or stopped.
Enabling detailed monitoring on an instance does not affect the monitoring of its attached EBS volumes. For more information, see Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Amazon EBS.
The following table highlights the differences between basic monitoring and detailed monitoring for your instances.
| Monitoring type | Description | Charges |
|---|---|---|
| Basic monitoring |
Status check metrics are available in 1-minute periods. All other metrics are available in 5-minute periods. |
No charge. |
| Detailed monitoring | All metrics, including status check metrics, are available in 1-minute periods. To get this level of data, you must specifically enable it for the instance. For the instances where you've enabled detailed monitoring, you can also get aggregated data across groups of similar instances. | You are charged per metric that Amazon EC2 sends to CloudWatch. You are not charged for
data storage. For more information, see Paid tier
and Example 1 - EC2 Detailed Monitoring on the Amazon CloudWatch pricing page |
Required permissions
To enable detailed monitoring for an instance, your user must have permission to use the MonitorInstances API action. To turn off detailed monitoring for an instance, your user must have permission to use the UnmonitorInstances API action.
Enable detailed monitoring at launch
Use the following procedures to enable detailed monitoring at launch. By default, your instance uses basic monitoring.
Manage detailed monitoring
Use the following procedures to manage detailed monitoring for a running or stopped instance.